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Art/Thomas B. Hess
ARSHILE GORKY
FLIES AGAIN

"... In 1941, the air corps, with customary thoroughness, ripped off, toasted, and otherwise destroyed Arshile Gorky's murals ..."

   Here is a legend from the theogony of the New York art scene: In 1941 Arshile Gorky got a commission, through his friend Isamu Noguchi, to paint a suite of murals for Ben Marden's Riviera - a pillbox pleasure dome on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, where there were floor shows, dancing, and limitless gambling, until the place burned to the ground a few years later.  Gorky asked another friend, Willem de Kooning, to help with the preliminary work, especially with transferring his squared-off sketches to the walls. 
   They were perched on the scaffolding, according to the legend, drawing on the plastered wall, when a man in a classically wide-shouldered polo coat, flanked by hoods, slouched into the room and gestured the artists down. 
   "I understand you're tops in your field," he said to Gorky.  "You did great at the Newark Airport and  you'll do a wonderful job for me.  You can do anything you want, paint any way you want; only," he paused for emphasis, and added in a gravel voice, "only, remember, no green."  He clumped out.
   Gorky and de Kooning looked at each other in awe and silence.  Then Gorky said, "Well, I never did like green."

   Gorky finished three sets of murals.  The first was a series of ten panels titled rather grandiosely Evolution of Forms Under Aerodynamic Limitations, done in 1936-37 for the Newark Airport Administration Building under the WPA Federal Art Project. In 1939, he quit the project to do a pair of large decorations for the Aviation Building at the New York World's Fair.  And then came the pictures for Ben Marden's Riviera.  The World's Fair murals were destroyed with the temporary building; you can judge them only from souvenir postcards.  Ben Marden's commission burned with the rest of the nightclub.  And in 1941, the army air corps invested the Newark installations and, with customary thoroughness, ripped off, toasted, and otherwise rendered inoperative the Gorky murals.
   Since 1946, various federal agencies have tried to find out exactly what had happened to them; the effort became increasingly urgent as the artist's reputation as one of the founders of postwar New York abstract painting became internationally acclaimed.
   In 1972, art historian Ruth Bowman joined the search, spurred by her identification of a preliminary study for the Newark project in the collections at NYU, where she was curator.  She enlisted the cooperation of the Port Authority, which has jurisdiction over the Newark complex, and the enthusiastic support of Saul Wenegrat, head of the authority's active, enlightened Committee on Art.  He accompanied Bowman and conservator Lawrence Majewski on a search in the Newark installation.  There wasn't a trace of the Gorkys, but there were piles of newly fashionable Art Deco furnishings and bric-a-brac. Wenegrat decided to have an inventory made of the material and assigned Stephen Stempler from his staff to follow through.  Stempler, with Harvard Law School training and the native wit of a private eye, deduced that the murals wouldn't be where the hunt had started, on the ground floor, because its walls are sheathed in marble.  He poked around the second floor. "A combination of logic and intuition," he says happily, brought him to a little hole in the wall.  A thread was visible inside it; could it be canvas?  He scratched at some paint nearby with a key and uncovered some areas of color.  A few days later, he took Majewski back to the spot, and the restorer confirmed that the colors were oil paint and that two panels of Gorky's suite, instead of being destroyed, merely had been painted over with wall enamel (fifteen coats in all, to be precise.)
   Both canvases were peeled off and shipped to Boston, where restorers Carroll Wales and Constantine Tsaousis, well known for their work on murals, spent more than a year dutifully picking off the white enamel and bringing Gorky's paint back to something resembling its original freshness.  The pictures now are stored at the Newark Museum and will be introduced to the public in an extensive Gorky exhibition which is being organized by Bowman and is scheduled to open in Newark in 1978, then tour the country (maybe coming to the Guggenheim in New York).  On these pages, the two Gorky paintings are reproduced for the first time in color. 
   The painter George Cavallon remembers watching Gorky work on the murals in the large open space on 37th Street where the WPA maintained a mural studio.  There was almost no privacy.  "I remember one morning it turned out that somebody had stolen Gorky's brushes," he said; "there was hell to pay."  Gorky didn't use assistants for the Newark job.  He painstakingly covered the whole 1,530 square feet himself.  For his World's Fair murals, de Kooning had helped lay down areas of flat color, and, as I've indicated, de Kooning assisted in projecting Gorky's preliminary drawings to the walls of the Riviera.  Both these commissions were payable in lump sums.  The WPA, however, paid by the hour.  Gorky profited by giving it more time.  (It can't be overemphasized that in this period- and for the following fifteen years- all the best American artists were flat broke.)
   In this stage of his development, Gorky adored doing and redoing a surface.  He took a sensuous delight in building up crisp edges that have something of the toughness of an Ingres.  He hated rulers.  He worked to a straight edge with almost visionary patience.
   You can spot his highly personalized, directional brush marks here and there, especially in certain areas of thick white.  ON the whole, however, there's been a saddening loss of surface.  The restorers have scrupulously differentiated between the original and the new in-painting, while retaining the overall evenness that Gorky required.  Flatness was an imperative; "the two-dimensional surface plane of the wall must be retained in mural painting," he wrote in a scenario justifying the murals.  Flatness also conflated subject matter. "The new vision that flight has given to the eyes of man," he added, "the isle of Manhattan, with all its skyscrapers from the view of an airplane five miles

The flight fantastic:  The two Gorkys recovered from beneath fifteen layers of wall enamel at the Newark Airport- "the wonders of the sky" (top), 77 inches high, and an abstraction of engine sections, 110 inches high; both were finished in 1937.

84   NEW YORK/SEPTEMBER 12, 1977